A process in the weather of the worldTurns ghost to ghost; each mothered child...Sits in their double shade.A process blows the moon into the sun,Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin;And the heart gives up its dead.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well.... In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

See where my Love sits in the beds of spices,Beset all round with camphor, myrrh, and roses,...And interlaced with curious devicesWhich her apart from all the world incloses!There doth she tune her lute for her delight,And with sweet music makes the ground to move,Whilst I, poor I, do sit in heavy plight,Wailing alone my unrespected love;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Genius sits in a glass house--but in an unbreakable one--conceiving ideas. After giving birth, it falls into madness. Stretches ou...t its hand through the window toward the first person happening by. The demon's claw rips, the iron fist grips. Before, you were a model, mocks the ironic voice between serrated teeth, for me, you are raw material to work on. I throw you against the glass wall, so that you remain stuck there, projected and stuck.... (Then come the lovers of art and contemplate the bleeding work from outside. Then come the photographers. "New art," it says in the newspaper the following day. The learned journals give it a name that ends in "ism.")LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

What a terrible thing has happened to us all! To you there, to us here, to all everywhere. Peace who was becoming bright-eyed, now... sits in the shadow of death; her handsome champion has been killed as he walked by her very side. Her gallant boy is dead. What a cruel, foul, and most unnatural murder! We mourn here with you, poor, sad American people.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »